In modern high-volume customer engagement centers (CEC), there are a number of ways communication between a customer service representative (CSR) and a customer can take place. For example, communication in a CEC can take place over the telephone, through email, and text chat, among other known communication methods. In a CEC, supervisors are typically assigned to monitor and assist frontline Customer Service Representatives (CSR's). Supervisors are typically experienced staff with detailed knowledge of the business domain the CEC is dealing with. CSR's are typically less experienced and rely on supervisors to help with complex or difficult interactions with customers.
Supervisors within a CEC are responsible for ensuring CSRs are providing a consistently high level of customer service. Current CEC computerized systems help with this task by allowing supervisors to monitor CSRs interactions with customers. Interactions can be monitored as they occur. For example, the supervisor can view a list of phone conversations that are in progress and select to listen in on one or a supervisor can view a list of active text chat conversations and select to view the chat messages being sent between the CSR and customer. If the supervisor detects a problem, such as the customer becoming frustrated or the CSR being rude then the system allows them to take action. For example, the supervisor may provide guidance to the CSR (unseen to the customer) helping them to resolve the issue or the supervisor may join the conversation or replace the CSR in the conversation to resolve the issue.
However, current CEC systems rely on supervisors to manually select and determine which interactions to monitor. There are not as many supervisors as there are CSRs, so it is impossible for a supervisor to monitor every interaction. Therefore, supervisors must use their judgement to select interactions to monitor, guessing where their assistance may be necessary in order to maintain a high level of customer service.
The result is that supervisors miss incidents where customer service is compromised and the supervisor could have intervened to help if they had been aware. These incidents may be detected after the fact, if customer phones back to complain or the supervisor reviews an interaction retrospectively, but customer satisfaction will already have been negatively impacted in these scenarios. Ideally a supervisor would be able to know which interactions are likely to require supervisor intervention and be able to concentrate on those interactions. There is an unmet need in the art for a system capable of automatedly notifying supervisors of interactions that have a greater need for monitoring and supervision.